


solstice

by stardustinthesky



Category: Farscape
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 01:34:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29377173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardustinthesky/pseuds/stardustinthesky
Summary: She feels guilty for not loving him, not enough, for longing for a man she may never see again. She fully understands now the depth of her feelings for him, for the one she could never have.-ficlet for 'The Locket'.
Relationships: John Crichton/Aeryn Sun
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	solstice

**Author's Note:**

> Muse-ic: "Lost and Found" by Hans Zimmer.

She hasn't seen this much green in a long time.

But as she stands at the end of field of flowers that goes on for metras, at the woods beyond and the horizon, she longs for the golden halls of the Leviathan she has come to call home.

"You'll learn to love it here," the man besides her says.

_Maybe_ , she lies.

-

It was only supposed to be a long-range recon for a few arns. But lost in the mist and unable to find her way back to Moya, her only hope came in the form of an opening in this stellar soup.

The barren planet below offers no respite but the sensors are at least working again; a few planets in the system, only one inhabited.

The opening closes just as she's trying to make her way back.

-

The inhabitants on the favored planet take her in; they tell her stories of people coming in through the opening in the mist. It reappears every fifty-five cycles, they say. Some had left, never to be heard again, others had stayed, made a life form themselves here.

_I was born in space_ , she tells them. _I belong up there._

_Maybe your life is here now_ , they reply.

-

There is a man, Jatin, and he is kind.

(fifty-five cycles _are_ a long time.)

-

She holds the locket Chiana gave her in her pocket, the one she took just before leaving. She opens it for the first time; John's face looking back at her, she can only feel the irony of it all.

-

Of Peacekeeper pregnancies, she only tells the man who became her husband the basics: geometric, they only last for solar days, a weeken at most.

She doesn't tell him of fetuses in stasis for seven cycles. Her pregnancy resumes less than six cycles after she's left Moya, and there is no way her husband is the father.

She feels guilty for not loving him, _not enough_ , for longing for a man she may never see again. She fully understands now the depth of her feelings for him, for the one she could never have.

-

He's as beautiful as she remembers; she traces the contours of his face with her hands, thinking about how the picture of him in her locket really doesn't do him justice. She almost tells Chiana that she should have chosen a better picture, but for once, she's thankful for her meddling.

She flees back to a home that was never really hers, holding onto the locket the whole way.

(he follows.

She both hates and loves him for that.)

-

"Nana," Ennixx pulls her aside as they enter the house. "I didn't want to say anything earlier, but your friend— he looks just like—"

Aeryn coughs, clutching her granddaughter's hand as hard as she can. "Not now, Ennixx."

_Not ever._

-

In the fifty-five cycles they spend together, she never tells him about her first child; her beautiful baby boy with fair hair and the bluest of eyes, of the one who wanted to live among the stars when he was a child, who'd always listened to the tales of the Leviathan that was her home, and of the people who lived in it.

Ennixx is sworn to secrecy; Aeryn knows John would do something foolish, so unbearable _him_ to try and do something, whatever his human brain would conjure. But she's lived without him for too many cycles to be able to let go now.

She holds on to her locket, even if she hasn't opened it in a long time, a locket he can't keep but look at whenever he thinks she's not looking. He plays with it when he lies down beside her at night, when she breathes steadily enough that he believes she's asleep.

He never opens it, though.

_Take a look inside. You'll see his image. The only love of my life._

It's a dare he doesn't take; it saddens her that he doesn't take the chance to know that she's loved him all along, and never stopped.

—end


End file.
